The ALP Start-Up Manual

Table of Contents

Introduction

Our History

Building Support

Research/Data

Publicity

Funding/Costs

Faculty Development

Logistics

Scaling Up

Reading and Math

Why Does ALP Work

June 23, 20102

Introduction

In this manual we have attempted to assemble as much is much as we can of what we have

learned over the four years that we have been piloting the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP)

at the Community College of Baltimore County. We hope that those attempting to start up a

version of ALP on their campuses will find it useful.

Of course, no two campuses are exactly alike. Different schools have different students, different

faculties, different politics, different organizations, different goals, different dreams, so we don’t

expect anyone to replicate ALP exactly the way we have at CCBC. Nevertheless, as you work to

develop a version of ALP that works in your context, we hope you find some of the ideas in here

to be helpful.

As you develop ALP in your context, we hope you’ll stay in touch and let us know what variations

on our model you introduce; we might want to adopt them too.

And we hope you’ll send us suggestions about this manual, which is very much a work in

progress.

June 23, 20103

Our History

As a general strategy, we recommend that you start small and grow slowly. We are a college of

about 35,000 students on three main campuses. Our English department comprises close to fifty

full-timers and perhaps twice that number of adjuncts. Each fall we offer around ninety sections

of our upper-level developmental writing course, ENGL 052; in the spring, we offer about two

thirds as many.

ALP has been incubating at CCBC since 1992. In that year, Peter Adams did a longitudinal study

of the success rates for students placed in ENG 052 and found that only about 26% of them

succeeded within four years, if success is defined as passing ENGL 052 and passing ENGL 101,

the credit-level writing course. (This study was reported in detail in “"Basic Writing

Reconsidered," which appeared in the Journal of Basic Writing in 1993.) Shortly after that

discovery, CCBC began a tumultuous decade during which three independent colleges were

merged into one with a predictable amount of strain and tension. Little progress on

developmental education at CCBC occurred until fall of 2006.

At this point the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, the Dean of Developmental Education, and

the Department Chair of the English Department decided that it was time to look for ways to

improve our developmental writing program. Their initial step was to create two coordinator

positions, one for the east side campuses and one for the west. At a meeting in a Pizza Hut in

fall 2006, these two coordinators, the department head, and the Dean for Developmental

Education had a fairly carb-heavy lunch, but made a very promising decision: we would develop

and pilot a model of developmental writing in which developmental students would be

mainstreamed into ENGL 101.

During that fall, the coordinators and the English Department chair studied various models of

mainstreaming around the country. We also took notice of the learning communities program

which was achieving considerable success on our campus. We developed a proposal for a pilot

program, which was presented to the entire English Department at its meeting in January 2007.

Surprisingly, without much rancor, the department approved the project, and ALP was launched.

During that spring semester, a small committee worked on the development of several models for

ALP and finally settled on the one we are currently using.

Under this model, students whose placement is in the upper-level developmental writing course

are given the option of enrolling in ALP. Those who volunteer register for one of the designated

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sections where they are joined by seven other developmental students and twelve students

whose placement is ENGL 101. In addition, the ALP students register for a section of the

developmental course that meets in the hour immediately following the 101. There, the same

instructor and the same eight students meet for a second hour. This class is conducted as a

workshop designed to improve each student’s chances of passing 101.

A few weeks later the coordinator who had taken the lead on the ALP project met with the Dean

for Developmental Education and the Vice President for Instruction to discuss the project. When

the VP heard that the class size in the ALP sections was going to be just eight, he said “No.

There is no way the college can afford to run sections with a class size of eight.”

The coordinator had, for many years, taught a mythology course. Sometimes, a week or so

before a semester was to begin, he would receive a phone call from his department chair. “Your

section of Mythology,” she would say, “has only eight students. Would you be willing to teach it

for just two credits of load instead of three?’ Having questioned this policy in the past, the

coordinator was aware that the college had determined that with eight students, the college

breaks even if the instructor receives only two credits of compensation. Drawing on his

knowledge of this policy, which had often irked him in the past, he offered a compromise to the

VP. “What if the faculty teaching the ALP sections with just eight students received only two

credits of compensation?”

After a few moments reflection, and perhaps calculation, the VP replied. “Okay. We’ll pilot a few

sections. But this is a Cadillac of a program; you’d better produce ‘Cadillac’ results.” The

coordinator inquired, what would the VP consider to be “Cadillac results.” “Oh, improving the

success rate by twelve or fifteen percentage points, at the least.” And the deal was struck.

The only problem was that now the ALP coordinator would have to convince his colleagues in the

English Department to accept this reduced compensation. At the May 2007 department meeting

the VP made an appearance, expressed his support for the proposed pilot, and added one

surprise: he’d like to see the first pilots offered in just a few months, in September of 2007. After

the VP left, the coordinator cleared up a few details, argued that because the class size of eight

would mean a considerable reduction in the number of papers to grade that the two credit

compensation was reasonable, and then held his breath. The department voted to approve the

pilot.

Now the problem would be to find five faculty willing to take on ALP at the compromise

compensation. Exactly five volunteered, including the coordinator himself. We met a number of

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times over the summer and agreed to meet once a month during the fall and to do lots of emailing

in between meetings. So, in September of 2007, the first five sections of ALP were offered, and

forty students signed up.

After grades were turned in, the five of us met one last time. We each reported what grades we

had given. In total, of our forty students, thirty-two (79%) had passed the developmental course,

and twenty-six (64%) had passed ENGL 101.

In spring of 2008, we had our first misstep: one section of ALP did not have enough enrollment,

so we ran only four sections. In fall of 2008, we doubled the number of sections we offered to ten

each semester. After a vigorous pr campaign in May and June, all the sections had filled by the

first of July. We also attracted a new group of faculty who joined the veterans. We offered

another ten sections in spring of 2009. At the end of our second year, we began to relax a bit

about results as we had achieved a success rate of over 60% (defined as passing both the

developmental course and ENGL 101) for four consecutive semesters.

This past year, 2009-2010, we again doubled the size of the program, offering a total of forty

sections enrolling approximately 320 students, with results that were slightly higher than previous

years. We now have twenty-nine faculty member who have taught ALP. In this academic year,

the Math Department also began piloting several different models of accelerated developmental

math courses, and we also offered our first sections of ALP ESOL and of an on-line version of

ALP.

Beginning in fall of 2010, we will offer forty sections of ALP which will accommodate 740 students

during the year, almost exactly half of the students who will be placed in the upper level

developmental writing course. We will also submit a formal proposal to have the ALP course

approved as a regular course at CCBC, ending the “pilot” phase.

So that’s how we did it. The rest of this manual is full of suggestions about how you might do it.

June 23, 20106

Building Support

Start small; build gradually. That may be the most important advice we can give you.

The idea of piloting ALP usually starts with a few people, maybe just one. The idea could

originate with a couple of teachers of developmental writing, with a department chair, with a

director of developmental education, or with several of these. At this early stage, it’s a good idea

to have some exploratory conversations, especially with people you think are likely to be

supportive. At this stage you have several goals:

to agree on the broad shape of what you want to do

to identify the key steps you need to accomplish to get it done

to develop a tentative timeline for accomplishing these steps

to identify people whose support will be essential

We discovered early on that there are two kinds of support: permissive and enthusiastic.

Permissive supporters may not be enthusiastic about your idea, but they are willing to let you give

it a try. Enthusiastic supporters not only give you permission, they energetically support your

efforts. Both are important. It would be great if everyone were an enthusiastic supporter, but,

especially in the early days, it may be enough if you simply have enough permissive support to

move ahead.

We strongly recommend that you propose this project, in the early stages, as a pilot. It is much

harder (but not impossible, as we learned from a few of our colleagues) for someone to oppose a

pilot. “What harm can there be in trying something out to see if it will work?” we would ask.

In our case, the initial idea started at almost the grass roots of the writing program, with the two

developmental writing coordinators and the department head. In order to access the likelihood of

this project being approved, we began conversations both up and down the hierarchy of the

college’s organization. We talked with a number of our colleagues in English, some of whom

were enthusiastic supporters and ended up being among our first ALP faculty. And we talked

with the Dean of Developmental Education, whom we had identified from her comments at our

initial meeting as a likely supporter, but also one who knew a lot about the limitations—both

financial and other—on what might be possible.

Having achieved at least permissive support from both these sources, we wrote a proposal for the

English Department which outlined our thinking and our goals but which discussed several

June 23, 20107

different approaches for accomplishing those goals. I would characterize the department’s

reaction as permission but not enthusiasm; nevertheless, the concept of piloting some version of

mainstreaming developmental writers into ENGL 101 was approved.

Having insured our department wouldn’t object to such a pilot program, we set up a meeting with

the Vice President for Instruction. We brought the data from our 1993 study showing the lack of

success of the existing developmental course (see page 4), lots of examples of mainstreaming

programs at other schools (particularly Arizona State, which had just published a report on their

“Stretch Program” at its tenth year, and a lot of enthusiasm. We were lucky. The VP was fairly

new on campus and had already announced that he thought developmental education was one of

our primary missions, one he intended to support. I think it also helped that this was an

innovation that was coming from the faculty, not something he would need to cajole us into doing.

And finally, I think it was much easier for him to approve a small scale pilot, that, if unsuccessful,

would disappear in a couple of years.

The big surprise for us was the extent of the VP’s enthusiasm as borne out in his suggestion that

we offer the first pilot sections in the fall, just three months off. I’m not sure at this point whether

that was a good idea or not. I think, with more preparatory time, we could have avoided a few

missteps. Most importantly, I think we would have developed a more rigorous program of faculty

development. But I do believe that it is important to take advantage of opportunities when they

arise, and one had just arisen, so we worked really hard for three months and succeeded in

getting five sections to run in September.

Having achieved permission from our colleagues and our administration, we next needed to build

support in other parts of the campus, particularly in these three areas:

advising

records and registration

institutional research

Numerous meetings with these three laid the ground work for a relationship that was crucial to the

success of the project. I’ll discuss these further in the following sections, but it is important to

point out here that the advisors are natural allies. On our campus, they have, over the years, felt

considerable resistance to the English Department’s system of assessment and placement.

When we proposed loosening up that system and allowing developmental writers to register

directly into ENGL 101, it didn’t take much to gain their support for the program.

June 23, 20108

It was also important in these early years to broaden our support among our colleagues. Each

semester, our policy was that any faculty who wanted to try out ALP for the first time had priority

for a section over faculty who had already taught it. This way we broadened the number of

enthusiastic supporters because those who taught ALP, with only one exception in four years,

found the experience extremely rewarding. As one of our first semester teachers put it, “This is

what I went into teaching for. This, finally, is the kind of teaching I’ve always wanted to do.”

In retrospect, I think this kind of experience is the primary reason faculty want to teach ALP, even

if the compensation is only two credit hours.

A second way we broadened support was with presentations. At department meetings, meetings

of program coordinators, developmental education symposia, regional conferences, and other

opportunities, we would talk about the results we were having with our students and the

satisfaction we were experiencing as teachers.

One caution. While few were willing to oppose a pilot of the program initially and few were willing

to oppose something producing such improved success rates, sometime late in our second year

and at the beginning of our third, we began to experience some resistance as people realized

they were no longer dealing with a tiny pilot that didn’t affect them. ALP, as it succeeded and

expanded, began to appear a little threatening to some faculty who were not interested in

participating. It became important for us to make clear that no one was going to be forced to

teach ALP and that no students were going to be forced to take it. We had established its

voluntary basis from the beginning, but as the program grew, this became a more significant

issue.

We have made it clear that we do not intend for ALP to become the only option for students

needing help with their writing skills. We are aware that we have a number of students who can

afford to take only one course each semester; ALP requires that they take the two writing courses

in the same semester. Some students have a great fear of writing courses; for them, the idea of

taking two writing courses in one semester may simply be too intimidating. And we also offer a

number of sections of the traditional developmental writing course in a learning community with a

credit-level course like Psych 101. We wouldn’t want to lose that possibility. So in fall of 2011,

when we ramp up the course to something like its final form, we anticipate offering enough

sections for about 75% of our developmental students. Then we’ll let them vote “with their feet,”

We’ll offer more or fewer sections according to how many students enroll.

June 23, 20109

In this section on building support, it’s also important to talk about building support among

students. In the first two or three semesters, we had to work hard to publicize the course and

recruit students. Today, we do much less of this because students hear about ALP from other

students. We have built up enough support among the students who have taken the course that

they are spreading the word much more effectively than we ever could.

Research/Data

Without doubt, our most important tool in winning support for ALP among faculty, administration,

and students has been the data we have produced.

Even before the first ALP class had met in fall of 2007, we had met with a representative of our

Instructional Research (IR) office to discuss what kinds of support were reasonable for us to

expect. IR on most campuses has many more requests for data than they are able to fulfill. Ours

is no exception, and yet we knew that doing a pilot was a waste of time if we didn’t have data to

evaluate the success or that pilot.

We think it is important to follow the following principles when working with your IR office:

to establish personal contact as early as possible so they know who you are and

understand what you are trying to do

make it clear to IR that the data they produce will actually be put to use; invite them to

presentations at which you use their data; ask them to present with you

ask for data as far in advance as you can

try to regularize your data requests; it’s much easier on IR if you are asking for the same

reports semester after semester (this is one we weren’t very good at)

It was helpful that our VP for Instruction let the IR office know that he considered data on ALP

important. It was also important that we were flexible in our requests; when we had to settle for

less data than we wanted or for receiving it later than we had hoped for, we understood.

So what kinds of data are essential?

First it is important to establish a group of students taking your traditional developmental course

that your ALP students will be compared with. We used all students who registered in our upper-

level developmental writing course in the fall of 2006, the year before we began ALP. This cohort

June 23, 201010

comprised 1023 students. In retrospect, we would have limited the group to those students who

were taking the course for the first time in fall 2006 because repeaters introduce more variables.

Second, even though the number of students in ALP will be fairly small in the early years, it is a

good idea to begin collecting data, nevertheless. Even the first year’s data, none of which was

significant because our numbers were so small, was extremely helpful in beginning to

demonstrate that the pilot was working and to justify doubling it for the second year.

A second benefit to collecting data even when you are running only a few sections is that you can

perfect the system for gathering data and get your IR office used to planning to run your reports

at the end of each semester. We discovered several tweaks that were needed in what we asked

IR for during that first year.

Finally, what data should you collect? I would recommend the following for all ALP students and

al students in your comparison group:

How many registered for the developmental course (we use data from the third week of

the semester)

How many passed the developmental course

How many registered for ENGL 101 (again we use third week data)

How many passed ENGL 101

How many took ENGL 102

How many passed ENGL 102

That’s the bare minimum. Then if you can, it would be great to look at the following:

Persistence from the semester they took developmental English to the next semester

Persistence from the semester they took developmental English to the next year.

How many have accumulated 15 credits

How many have accumulated 30 credits

How many have accumulated 45 credits

How many have received a certificate

How many have received an AA degree

How many have transferred

June 23, 201011

What makes this a little complicated is that you don’t collect this data just once. You have to

collect it each semester, or at least once a year. So you will be following students in each cohort

for at least four years, ideally six.

There is a second approach to data that you can have much more control over: surveys of your

students and faculty. We do a survey of students in ALP and in a comparison group of regular

developmental writing courses at the beginning and end of each semester. We started out with

paper and pencil surveys, had a brief flirtation with SNAP, and have now settled down with

Survey Monkey, a survey web site that is free if your survey has ten items or fewer and you have

100 or fewer responses to each survey. For $19.95 a month, you get an unlimited number of

items on each survey, and you can receive up to 1000 responses each month. We use it to

evaluate the program, but many of us also use brief surveys of just a few items as classroom

assessments throughout the semester. SurveyMonkey also tabulates the results for you and

produces cute little bar charts.

We have used these types of surveys to learn more about our students and about the effects ALP

has on them. Copies of all the surveys are included on the flash drives distributed at the

Conference on Acceleration.

Publicity

The primary need for publicity, especially in the early years, is to attract students. We actually

had to cancel one section in our second semester because it was under enrolled. One of the

partner schools that tried to implement ALP this year was unsuccessful because they couldn’t

attract enough students.

The problem seems to be how to get the word out. Once students hear about ALP, many of them

find it a much more attractive route to follow than traditional developmental courses, but getting

word of the program to them is not easy. Here’s how we tackled it in the first two years.

I met at the beginning of the registration season each semester with the advisors on each

of our three campuses. This was undoubtedly the most important tactic. Once the

advisors understand what ALP is, they are very supportive and enthusiastically

encourage students to take it. Now that the program is well established, we don’t meet

face-to-face each semester, but instead I send out a letter describing the program and

listing all the sections for the next semester.

Posters and flyers in the waiting area at records and registration.

Appearance at orientation sessions to talk about ALP.

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One of our early ALP students came up with an idea that we haven’t used, but someone

else might: getting tee shirts made up for ALP students that say on them, “Ask me about

ALP,” and asking all present and former ALP students to wear them around campus on a

particular day near the beginning of registration for the next semester.

Funding/Costs

You’ve all seem my PowerPoint demonstrating that ALP actually costs less per successful

student than traditional developmental writing. That PowerPoint is also available on the flash

drives as B2-Intro to ALP.

Here I want to talk about start-up costs for ALP. Although this will vary widely from campus to

campus, I think it might be helpful to know what the start up of ALP at CCBC cost the institution

and what we might have done if additional funds had been available.

From the start, the college recognized the need for a director, someone to make the program run,

to plan ahead, and to put out fires. I took on the additional role of publicizing the program widely

in an attempt to encourage its adoption at other schools, but that should not be a necessary

function for most programs.

Let’s start by explaining that at CCBC, we are on the semester system, and each full-time faculty

member is expected to teach 15 credit hours (five three-credit courses) each semester, unless he

or she is on some reassigned time (often called released time) to perform other duties, usually

administrative. In 2006-7, the year when we proposed and prepared for the first semester’s

courses the following fall, I was on three credits of reassigned time to coordinate the

developmental program on the east side of town. As we moved toward the decision to implement

ALP in the spring, I started using a good deal of my time as east side coordinator simply to

organize the start up of ALP.

In our first year of offering courses, 2007-8, I was awarded an additional three hours of

reassigned time to direct ALP and retained the three hours for east side developmental

coordinator. I continued to use much of the time when I was supposed to be observing new

developmental faculty and organizing norming sessions for developmental courses for

administrative duties connected with ALP.

In retrospect, I think the director needed at least six hours of reassigned time for nothing but ALP.

Stealing time from another job was not a good solution, and some things simply didn’t get done.

June 23, 201013

In addition to reassigned time for the director of ALP, in the first semester, the college gave each

ALP instructor, five of us, one credit of reassigned time because we were teaching a course none

of us had ever taught before and we were spending a great deal of time meeting and emailing

each other to try to figure out how to do it.

Aside from minor printing costs for some flyers and posters, that was it. Starting up the program

was not an expensive operation for the college, but there are two areas that would have

benefitted greatly from additional support: research and faculty development.

I have discussed earlier how we had to request that the IR office generate the data we needed on

top of all the other requests they were handling. If the college could have afforded it, the hiring of

a part-time researcher to work in the IR office on our date would have been of great assistance.

In addition, that person, could have helped us design and conduct student surveys more

effectively to study the effects of ALP on our students.

I’ll discuss how we could have used more funding for faculty development in the next section.

Faculty Development

In the area of faculty development, we have done very little. We try to meet three times during

each semester, but finding times that work for faculty located on three different campuses isn’t

easy. We do conduct orientation sessions for new ALP faculty before the semester starts, but we

could use much more than that.

It is, however, important to note, that ALP does not have a pedagogy. We do not use a common

text or give common assignments. Some of us do more lecturing, while many encourage a more

active-learning approach. The ways we conduct our classes are as diverse as the ways the

English faculty teach all their courses, at least at CCBC, with common goals but a wide range of

approaches.

For one semester, in fall 2008, the ten ALP instructors received one additional reassigned time

credit to compensate them for developing a faculty handbook, which does begin to describe our

pedagogy in ALP, but it is just a beginning. The handbook, which is included on the flash drive

for the conference, includes a series of sections on such topics as grading, writing assignments,

handling behavioral issues, error, and many more. Each topic is then divided into three parts: the

first part lists what we have agreed is required in every section, the second part lists strong

recommendations, and the third part list suggestions.

June 23, 201014

Now that we have found, over eight semesters, that we have raised the success rate for

developmental writing students from under 30% to over 60%, we want to figure out how to raise it

more . . . another 15 or 20%. We think the key to doing this is to improve our pedagogy. We are

hoping to find funding to support a group of faculty to devote considerable time to this project.

One result will be a much more thorough and helpful faculty handbook.

Logistics

Here I will discuss a number of very practical matters, most of which we discovered by trial and

error.

1. Getting students to register in the right numbers, especially in the 101 class where we

want twelve 101-level students and 8 ALP students proved extremely difficult the first

year. Then our registrar came up with a brilliant solution that has eliminated 99% of the

problems. The eight ALP seats in the class and the twelve 101-level seats in the class

are listed in the course schedule and in the Banner Student Information System as two

separate sections with entirely different identification numbers, which we call CRNs.

These two different class simply meet at the same time in the same room and have the

same instructor, but they have different prerequisites and different class size limits. The

101 class size is twelve, and the ALP, is eight. So Records and Registration knows when

the ALP seats are full when the 101 seats are not.

2. We gave a lot of thought to whether we should identify the ALP students in the 101 class

or not. We decided that we should not, which then meant we had to schedule the

developmental class that follows each 101 in a different room. Otherwise, when the 101

class ended and eight students stayed in their seats as everyone else left, it would be

obvious who the ALP students were. As it turns out, the students find this to be much less

of an issue than we did. Most of them self-identify after a couple of weeks of classes.

3. We know that many of the reasons that our developmental students don’t succeed has

nothing to do with thesis statement or comma splices. Many of our students give up

because of financial problems or medical problems or marital problems or legal problems

or any one of many others. To help keep these “life problems” from decimating our ALP

classes, we have assembled a roster of consultants with expertise in a wide range of “life

problems” and who are available to meet with our students or even to visit our classes.

4. Which developmental students should take ALP? We’ve given this a lot of thought and

concluded that any student whose placement is our upper-level developmental course

should be allowed to take ALP. This includes students whose placement score is at the

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very bottom of the range for placement into the upper-level developmental writing course

as well as those who were initially placed in the lower-level developmental writing course

and who passed it.

5. Who should teach ALP? From the beginning we decided that if ALP was going to work, it

would have to work regardless of who was teaching it. So there are no restrictions. Full-

timers and adjuncts, senior faculty and our newest hires. All have taught ALP, and so far

we have had only one faculty member who had an unsuccessful experience. We do not

think that only our strongest or most experienced teachers should teach ALP.

6. Classrooms. CCBC, like many other schools, has experienced tremendous enrollment

growth in the last two years. This has placed considerable strain on classroom space.

Because our ALP sections with just eight students, in most cases, meet in classrooms

that can hold twenty-five or thirty, we are under some pressure to find a way to use

classroom space more efficiently. In fact, it was primarily this issue that caused one of

our partner schools that had planned to start ALP this year to postpone it for several

years. We have come up with two solutions to this problem:

We have scoured the campuses for underused small rooms—conference rooms or

small group study rooms. We are moving a number of eight-student ALP classes into

these rooms, which turn out to be better spaces for our small groups.

We have a number of classrooms that have two doors, one in the front and one in the

back. We are proposing, now that ALP is clearly hear to stay at CCBC, that these be

permanently divided in half and used for two ALP sections. No, we will not settle for

those accordion folding doors.

7. Computers. Most of our ALP classes meet in computer classrooms. However, most

computer classrooms are equipped with twenty or more computers. As with large

classrooms, having eight students occupy a room with twenty computers is not a good

use of technology. Our solution has been to equip the small rooms we are beginning to

use with ten laptops. These computers are locked in a cabinet to which the instructor has

the combination. In between classes they are placed back in the cabinets where their

batteries are re-charged. Some of the instructors have also tried to climb into these

cabinets for recharging, but so far that hasn’t worked.

Scaling Up

We said at the beginning of this manual that we recommend starting small, but we also

recommended growing, albeit slowly. It is important not to allow your accelerated program to

June 23, 201016

become the province of just one or two instructors and to simply stagnate . . . doing a good job

with a few dozen students each year, but that’s all. If ALP works on your campus, in anything

close to the percentages it has on ours, then your goal should be grow it into becoming the

primary mode of developmental writing instruction.

We have found pressure on growth from two directions. From above, from our very supportive

administration, we occasionally hear, “Why are we growing it so slowly?: Sometimes the

metaphor of medical research is used. In medicine, when one group is given a treatment and

another a placebo, after a couple of years, if the treatment group shows dramatic progress, the

experiment may be called off and everyone given the treatment.

We have received the opposite pressure from others, mostly those who have to find the

classroom space and the faculty to teach all these sections. Our department head and campus

coordinators, while completely supportive of ALP, sometimes wonder why we have to grow so

fast.

I think we’ve got it about right. The exact rate of growth isn’t so important, but growth is. If ALP is

only implemented around the margins, then the amount of improvement in success rates will only

be marginal.

Reading and Math

At CCBC acceleration got its start in the writing program, but has since spread to many other

areas. The Math Department has experimented with five different models. The Reading

Department has a different problem. There is no credit-level reading course to mainstream

students into. Instead, Reading has made great use of the learning communities approach to

accomplish similar goals. Developmental reading courses are paired with credit-level courses

like psychology, business, or speech. Student sign up for both courses, whose topics and

readings are closely coordinated.

This year we have also begun offering an ALP version of ESOL.

Why Does ALP Work

We discussed this question extensively in the presentation at the conference and presented data

from student surveys and elsewhere that we think suggests what it is about ALP that is causing

the dramatic improvement in success rates. That PowerPoint is available on the flash drive you

June 23, 201017

received at the conference. Here all I want to do is list the features of ALP that we think are

essential to the success it has generated:

mainstreamed into ENGL 101

membership in cohort

meaningful context

small class size

shortening of pipeline

exposure to strong writers

attention to behavioral issues

attention to outside problems

We hope you’ll be able to incorporate all eight of these, with some modification into accelerated

develomental education on your campus. And we hope you’ll discover a couple more and let us

know about them.

Improving developmental education is rewarding for those of us teaching; it is essential for our

students. Stay in touch.

Peter Adams

padams2@ccbcmd.edu

http://tiny.cc/ALPccbcMD

June 23, 201018